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Photon Holds Funeral for Mobile Apps, Secures $4.5M for Agent Development
Confirmed
In Short: Photon, an AI startup, held a mock funeral for mobile apps and secured $4.5 million in seed funding to develop agents that work through messaging apps.
Photon, an AI startup, held a mock funeral for mobile apps in San Francisco on September 17, complete with speeches and panels from tech giants like Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI.
CEO Daniel Tian believes the era of mobile apps is coming to an end, though he acknowledges the transition will take time.
Tian envisions a future where agents communicate directly with each other, facilitating tasks like travel planning without the need for users to install new apps.
Photon's package of tools includes a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a command-line interface (CLI), and an observability suite to support developers building agents.
The startup aims to help developers create agents that work over messaging platforms such as iMessage and WhatsApp, providing users with seamless access to services.
Photon's $4.5 million seed funding will be used to further develop these products and support the shift from apps to agents.
Meanwhile, researchers studying high-energy photons have identified an exceptional photon that traveled 2 billion light-years to Earth, challenging current physics theories.
This photon, detected by the Carpet cosmic ray detector at the Baksan Observatory in Russia, had an energy of 300 teraelectronvolts (TeV), far exceeding previous observations.
Astrophysicist Giorgio Galanti from INAF noted, 'We started from a very simple question: How did this photon survive a journey that, according to known physics, should have destroyed it?
Theories suggest that quantum-gravity models could explain the photon's survival, indicating that Lorentz invariance might bend at high energy levels, making the universe more transparent to high-energy photons.
This finding could also explain the delay of about an hour between the arrival of this high-energy photon and lower-energy photons from the same gamma-ray burst.
The discovery challenges the understanding of how photons interact with cosmic microwave background radiation, suggesting that high-energy photons might find ways to traverse the universe without being converted into other particles.
What this adds
The app funeral was a developer day for Photon, featuring panels from tech companies.
The photon's journey challenges traditional physics theories and opens new avenues for research.
The photon's survival could indicate a fundamental shift in our understanding of high-energy particle interactions.
What's confirmed
- Photon, an AI startup, held a mock funeral for mobile apps in San Francisco on September 17, complete with speeches and panels from tech giants like Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI.
- CEO Daniel Tian believes the era of mobile apps is coming to an end, though he acknowledges the transition will take time.
- Tian envisions a future where agents communicate directly with each other, facilitating tasks like travel planning without the need for users to install new apps.
- Photon's package of tools includes a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a command-line interface (CLI), and an observability suite to support developers building agents.
- The startup aims to help developers create agents that work over messaging platforms such as iMessage and WhatsApp, providing users with seamless access to services.
- Photon's $4.5 million seed funding will be used to further develop these products and support the shift from apps to agents.
- Meanwhile, researchers studying high-energy photons have identified an exceptional photon that traveled 2 billion light-years to Earth, challenging current physics theories.
- This photon, detected by the Carpet cosmic ray detector at the Baksan Observatory in Russia, had an energy of 300 teraelectronvolts (TeV), far exceeding previous observations.
- Astrophysicist Giorgio Galanti from INAF noted, 'We started from a very simple question: How did this photon survive a journey that, according to known physics, should have destroyed it?
- Theories suggest that quantum-gravity models could explain the photon's survival, indicating that Lorentz invariance might bend at high energy levels, making the universe more transparent to high-energy photons.
- This finding could also explain the delay of about an hour between the arrival of this high-energy photon and lower-energy photons from the same gamma-ray burst.
- The discovery challenges the understanding of how photons interact with cosmic microwave background radiation, suggesting that high-energy photons might find ways to traverse the universe without being converted into other particles.
What's still developing
- The move to host an app funeral was obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but Tian believes the app era is coming to an end.
- “Honestly, it’s going to take a while, but I think, directionally, it’s inevitable,” he said of the shift from apps to agents.
- “I think, in the future, agents will be able to find you the agent that can do the right things — so it’s going to be the A-to-A communication layer,” Tian said.
- For instance, if a person was chatting with their AI assistant making travel plans, the agent could pull in other agents when needed, like a flight-booking agent or hotel-booking agent.
- Two leading possibilities are hypothetical particles known as ultralight axions and dark photons.
- Turning Earth Into a Giant Dark Matter Detector Many traditional axion experiments try to convert axions into photons by exposing them to extremely strong magnetic fields inside laboratories.
- The agreed laws of physics put limits on how far photons can travel in space – but researchers just identified a photon that's broken those fundamental rules and achieved the impossible, traveling 2 billion light-years to Earth.
- The proposed theory also fits with another observation from GRB 221009A: The 300 TeV photon arrived about an hour after lower-energy photons – a delay that a separate study found could also be explained by this kind of Lorentz invariance violation.
- It's filled with cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the faint afterglow left behind by the Big Bang, which interacts with high-energy photons and converts them into other particles.
- There's no escaping the CMB if you're a photon packed with energy – but somehow it's happened.
- Measured at 300 teraelectronvolts (TeV), it contained about 100 trillion times more energy than a visible light photon does.
- Researchers have debated ideas about long-distance photon travel before, but only for a few tens of teraelectronvolts.